


Kissing Your Reflection

by allegheny



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: Character Study, Chicago Cubs, Inaccuracies, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, Long Discussions Of Chase Utley, M/M, Philadelphia Phillies, Religious Conflict, Washington Nationals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22853005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allegheny/pseuds/allegheny
Summary: It's all a blur, his adolescence. A jumbled-up mix of boxes to check and tangled feelings and the sub-paranoid, uncomfortably truthful knowledge that he was being watched, that he was being expected.Bryce Harper is at a crossroads of his life. It's time for a review.
Relationships: Bryce Harper & Jayson Werth, Bryce Harper/J.T. Realmuto, Kris Bryant/Bryce Harper
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	Kissing Your Reflection

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write this for a little while now. Bryce makes a fascinating character. So I finally got to it.  
The fic was heavily influenced by the song Seeing Other People by Belle and Sebastian, as well as [In spring (training) a young man's fancy turns](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093936) by becka, and classic mid 2000's livejournal era baseball fic like candle_beck's. I tried to kind of bring my style a little closer to those.  
I also was inspired by the cancellation of Harper's wedding last minute in early 2015.

He was a pudgy kid.  
Big kid. Tall and strong and mannish at eleven, too big for boys his age. The lingering baby fat offset his awkwardly bulky frame somehow, but he towered over the other boys. Chunky shoulders and big chubby arms were his weapons of choice behind the plate and elsewhere at school.  
Bryce Harper was the son of an ironworker. There was no way around it: it was like he’d been born to hammer steel in the desert, his half-grown body built to bend rebar already. Failing that he'd have to utilize himself somehow. He was a tool and a tool ought to be used. God made no mistakes.

When he wakes up sometimes, when he lies there half-asleep, he remembers being eleven, lost in his too-big body. A man among boys.  
It occurs to him every time before he falls back asleep that he's never really fit in anywhere, but he always drifts off before he can elaborate on that thought.

\----

The thing with Realmuto was always bound to happen. Bryce had felt the tension between them right away, like a live-wire running between their bodies when he stepped up to the plate and that big guy was crouching behind him.  
He was built like a god-damn tank, calves bulging through his pants, and Bryce was having the kind of season they write about in the fucking history books.

"You steppin' in?" The voice was mid-range, Southern, the eyes behind the mask blue and creased up in an irritated pout.

"Jeez, man." Bryce had grimaced. "Relax a little."

He'd driven in their lone two runs of a loss and given Realmuto something to sneer about, but as far as divisional rival introductions went it was pretty standard.  
There was no bad blood on Bryce's side, of course. He'd never let the unwritten nor the written rules get in the way of things. Especially not _those_ things. Realmuto was a player's player. A catcher's catcher. Squat and bulky with the reflexes of a cat, a pop time that shouldn't be humanly fucking possible, and a compact swing so sweet it had always seemed too simple. And fuck, a body to die for, built for football and wrestling, shit, _wrestling_, the fucker had been bred to be a god-damn wrestler, what's a guy supposed to do?  
Bryce couldn't find in himself the will not to fraternize. So there was not-so-quiet admiration on his side; fuck knows what Realmuto was sitting on on the other.  
Well, it couldn't have been so bad, because after all, Bryce is in Realmuto's hotel bed right now and he spent the night again.

"Pivetta today." Realmuto mumbles, sat up on the other end of the bed and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. "Motherfucker better listen... I got not time for his ego bullshit."

Bryce snorts. Realmuto's one of those Bull Durham old school catchers who like their pitching staff at attention. None of that soft, buddy-buddy stuff — which, really, Bryce has nothing against, but it's just not what Realmuto is. He'd learned catching in the minors from hardasses with no time to waste. He commanded respect with his game-calling prowess, and if a petulant little jerkoff with a six-plus ERA wanted to step out of line, he had to acknowledge that Realmuto could just as well have his foot on his throat in five seconds flat first.  
Yeah, better be fucking scared of J.T. Realmuto, buddy.

Realmuto slides off the bed and stretches briefly, so curt and held together like catchers can be, good taut back muscles rolling underneath the soft skin. Bryce feels outrageously indolent lying there tangled in sheets like some kind of Renaissance nude while Realmuto confidently zips around the room stark naked to gather clothes and toiletries. Bryce stares. He’s a real fucking work of art. Every line on his body is answered by a curve, everything indulgent and sculpted with hard angles and round muscles like a statue to the glory of sports and sex. For a little, Bryce lets himself imagine him padding back to the bed and rolling him over and pulling him up just enough, hauling one knee onto the mattress for purchase and fucking him again, fast and raw and fucking amazing, because Realmuto's great at it, makes Bryce come hard every single time, gets him all drunk on testosterone and endorphins, shit, Bryce could totally go for another round right now, but the bastard’s off to shower.

"I'm getting breakfast with the 'pen, by the way." He interjects, head peeking out from the bathroom. "Gotta talk shop. You'd be better off sticking with Hoskins and company."

That's Realmuto's polite and probably truthful way of telling him to head out. At least he's a Southern gentleman about it. And Bryce gets it. It's not like he's asking anything more than outstanding dick from this whole situation. That's the way these things are. Realmuto's married and they're good friends, close friends who fuck around, close friends who fuck around and are deliriously good at it. It's good, it's great, even, and Bryce knows better than to expect any more, so he rolls out of bed, pulls on his scattered clothes, and heads back to his room.

\-----

There was the flickering dawn of an ounce of realization as he saw the look on Kris's face when he showed him the tube of lipstick.

"She won't know we used it!"

"Um." Kris's eyes had always been so big and so blue. "Dude. I don't know."

They were standing in Bryce's sister's bedroom and they were thirteen. It's a stretch to call any thirteen year old boy a teenager, or at least it was when they were thirteen. Sure, their bodies were ahead of their years, but life in a pubescent skin-suit felt like trying to run a cassette tape through a CD player. As if to defy their growing limbs and appetites, their brains had seemingly stopped maturing. They were kids, middle school kids, not all that great at division yet and too engrossed in cartoons and baseball cards still to parse the J.D. Salinger book Kris's brother Nick had vainly tried to shove into their hands. They were middle school kids who could beat high school kids' asses on the baseball diamond, but hormones, for now, were just a matter of leg hairs and growing pains.

Despite the best efforts of their brains clinging to childhood, though, there was a sense of reaching some kind of boundary. Some kind of line that screamed, 'mess about while you still can. Shit's about to get serious.’  
And serious it would get. But for the moment, the new looming threat seemed to hover above them like the Sword of Damocles, leaving them to their devices but unnerving them into strident attacks of unpersonable recklessness.

It was far from the first time Bryce had raided a makeup drawer. His mother had a collection of frosted pink shades from the early 2000's, at the confluence of modest and fashionable, and the one rich, dark red lipstick, almost untouched, that stained Bryce's thin lips like he'd been kissed. He'd bought a vial of bright nail polish, for catching, for the signs, he'd pretexted, and spent evenings painting each finger, before rubbing them with acetone, the thought of wearing them outside the safe perimeter of his bedroom seeming ridiculous. Mascara and liquid eye liner seemed to transform his grey eyes in the mirror, turning his long oval face into something else.  
In his reflection, underneath the awkward bangs his mother cut herself to save money on the barber, the face that looked back wasn't an awkward half-child, a baseball prodigy growing too large already. It was Bryce, the boy inside, the real person he already knew he couldn't be. He'd contemplate himself for minutes on end, captivated by the possibility.

He'd thought Kris, quiet Kris, who never spoke up and liked to sit in silence in the back seat when his dad gave Bryce a ride back, Kris who'd never looked at girls and only cared about baseball, Kris who'd sit on the couch next to Bryce and share a bag of chips with him and a thousandth re-run of The Sandlot but never would even consider hanging out outside with the other guys, maybe Kris could use a little clarity.

Well, from the look he was giving Bryce, maybe he'd been mistaken.

"It's just to try it on." he said, kind of fretfully self-aware now.

Kris's eyes darted back and forth between Bryce, the door, and the window, wider than Bryce thought they could ever get.

"Won't we get in trouble?" Kris asked and his voice tailed off into a squeak. Embarrassed by the sound, he covered his mouth with his hand like he'd said a bad word.

"I told you. She won't know." Bryce reasserted, as confidently as he could just right then.

Kris's saucer eyes finally rested on the golden tube in Bryce's hand.

"Want me to put it on you?" Bryce finally offered, cautiously.

Kris hesitated, and then dropped down on the bed next to him. The built-up pressure in Bryce's chest released a little as he inched closer..

"Okay. Stay still."

Kris closed his eyes, and Bryce placed his hand at the curve of Kris's jaw, just to steady his hands, and his fingers prickled with a feeling he couldn't quite put a name on.  
The lipstick slid clean over Kris's mouth, his bottom lip was plump and easy to mark, but Bryce took extra special care with his upper one, because the way it dipped down into his cupid's bow was so different from the small notch Bryce's made.

"There." He let out, when he was done.

They both turned towards the mirror, and looked at Kris's reflection, mesmerized to speechlessness for a moment. Then, Kris softly popped his lips and let out a reluctantly pleased but nervous giggle, angling his jaw at the mirror.

“Dude.” Kris chuckled, still staring. “I look ridiculous.”

Bryce flushed a furious shade of red that almost matched the lipstick, unsure if he was amused or angry or embarrassed or a combination of any of the three.

“No. You look good.” He retaliated, a little abruptly. “You look,” Kris looked _really_ good. Kris looked— “Pretty.”

Kris looked up, temporarily distracted from his own image, and turned his face towards Bryce, bright red mouth bringing out the icy blue of his irises. He wouldn't even need eye makeup, Bryce thought, intensely; with his eyelashes so dark and thick he looked perpetually brushed with mascara. Kris gave him a lopsided look, something piqued and anxious, face seized up like he'd never been called that before.

“You think so?”

“Yes.” Bryce urged, eagerly. “Really pretty. “

Kris's eyes drifted back to the mirror, his brow softening but still looking halfway to bewilderment.

“What’s it look like on you?” He finally asked, unbelievable sincerity crowding his voice.

Bryce’s heart jumped, and he fumbled for the lipstick, turning to the mirror.  
There would be other afternoons like that one that travel ball summer and beyond. Adolescence, and all the complications of shame and truth, would not reach them just yet.  
Childhood, Bryce thinks, is an insufferable cop-out.

\-----

Baseball, much like gambling, is both about luck and addiction.  
Your body's the lever on a blaring, blinking slot machine, and you maniacally pull at it each turn at the plate, hoping for results, looking for patterns, willing yourself into telepathy.  
And you crave that feeling, that rush of endorphins, when miraculously everything lines up and probabilities briefly shatter the ceiling. In that moment there's only you and the hypnotic trajectory of the ball, the sound of its collision with the bat rattling your bones, and the weightless feeling of adrenaline rushing through your veins. So you come back for it, every time, even though the odds of you failing are always higher than the odds of you mashing one out to center field.  
Not that Bryce has ever gambled.

It’s one of the habits that has stuck, like soberness. He's stopped pretending that he didn't swear a long time ago, but some of the prerogatives of his performative Mormonism remain through his tacit estrangement from the Church.  
It’s a lot like a common agreement: he isn't about to kick up a fuss about leaving, and they don’t want the bad publicity, either. He makes them look good, and they get the money anyway. They sure don’t bother checking if he’s actually showing up to service or temple, or adhering to the chastity rules. As long as he keeps funneling his stipend into their vault, they’re happy to let him sleep in on Sundays and fuck the shit out of his catcher. It’s cynical, sure, but it’s a price he’s willing to pay for the peace of mind of the status quo.

He isn’t here to make any big statements. He has enough of them to deal with in baseball already.

"See, I never picture you as a Vegas guy." Knapp says, spinning idly in his chair.

"That so?" Bryce replies mechanically. God knows what happens in that guy’s head.

"To be fair, I always forget people live in Vegas."

"Everyone gather round, Knappy over there just found out Vegas is real." Kingery rails, walking past them to his locker, equipment bag slung over his broad shoulder — Bryce can't get used to how much he's bulked up.

"Shut up, Scott." Knapp ruffles, a little hurt. "You know what I mean. It's just with all the movies and shit. It makes it look like one big casino, right?"

"Right, so I guess you thought Brooklyn was like Gangs of New York or some shit? It’s a little different, Knappy. Ever heard about hipsters?” Kingery's mockery doesn't have to be so bad in itself. It's the tone of his voice that kills you. He looks soft, and he’s usually a quiet, chilled out guy, but he talks a big game that he probably can actually back up now that he looks like a buffed-out chihuahua.

Knapp rolls his eyes, but the flush on his face betrays the real embarrassment behind the put-on dismissiveness.

"Yeah, alright, great, ha, ha." He groans, folding his arms together on his chest and leaning back into the leather chair like a sulking child.

Pivetta, who'd been lying on the couch with his ankles crossed on the armrest playing some stupid game on his phone until now, cranes his neck up like a bird.

"No, but, I mean. He's got a point, you know?"

"Who does?" Bryce asks, only tangentially interested in the conversation, to be quite frank. He's getting distracted by the ESPN baseball highlights running on the TV.

"Knappy." Pivetta pauses, for emphasis more than anything it seems. It falls flat. "I mean, he's right. If there's one city— I mean, it's like Orlando, you know? Disneyland. But people live there too."

"Truly astute observations from the battery." Kingery mutters, shoving a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth.

"Jesus, shut UP." Pivetta groans, throwing the empty Wawa plastic cup he'd been drinking out of at Kingery. The light translucent material doesn't carry and the cup drops to the floor pathetically halfway through its journey, rolling softly to Kingery's feet.

"Pitcher, huh?" Kingery kicks at it with the tip of his shoeless toes. "Yikes."

"Why don't you focus on being less of a little shit and let the grown-ups talk, eh?"

"Interesting offer. Why don't you fuck off?"

The three of them are always going back and forth. Like high school kids, Bryce thinks, not that he could pretend to have had the time to be that kind of high school kid when he was the age. They've gone up through the system together, hung out as teammates in Allentown for a couple years, and they know each other, love to get on each other's nerves, all of them. That’s something else Bryce doesn't have — hasn't had. He'd shot up the minors so fast he couldn't make any attachments, spending half-seasons in Single and Double A, barely stopping by in Triple A where the second youngest guy was three years older than him. He was a kid back then, and a hotshot at that, and confused as how to act, no one patient or willing enough to sit with him and teach him the ropes until he was saddled to Werth upon being brought up to Washington. There was no point in trying to be buddies with a guy who, on top of not even wanting to come out and drink, wasn't even going to stick around.  
If he's being honest, he kind of envies those relationships. Hoskins and Kingery, so close Kingery always seems to hang out with Hoskins and his wife at their Fishtown pad. The three assholes arguing about nothing in his close vicinity right now. It’s enviable.

"What I'm saying is, what I'm SAYING IS," Pivetta insists, talking over a yappy Kingery, "I don't even know what— what where people live in, in Vegas, I mean, what that looks like."

"Right?" Knapp exclaims, emboldened by the support of his pitcher. "I keep imagining those guys just living in casinos."

"Gotta look a lot like Phoenix, I guess. Lot like Scottsdale, even." Pivetta gives Kingery a look.

"Which means?" Kingery raises an eyebrow.

"Nothing, Scotty. Nothing." Pivetta smiles, winking at Knapp and getting a wink back. Inside joke.

"Whatever—"

"Atta boy."

"Like," Knapp continues, spinning in his chair again. "How old even is Vegas? Is there, like, old stuff there? Mission stuff, or whatever? Like in Sac City? I can't picture it without all the light shows and fake Eiffel Tower and shit."

Until then Bryce was content to just observe the show for a little while he pulled on his socks — it was like a nature documentary. But now he guesses he has to step in.

"Well—"

"Is it like Reno or something? I know Reno, like, it's not far from Granite Bay. It started as a mining town and all."

"Actually, it was founded by LDS missionaries." Bryce says, feeling as if he's reading off the script. And then, when he's met with a somewhat vacant look from Pivetta, "Mormons."

"Oooh." Knapp says, enlightened. "Right. Wait, what the fuck? How'd it end up like this then?"

"You know the Strip isn't the whole city, right?" Bryce deadpans.

“No, that’s the point, he's stupid. Wasn't the mafia involved, or something?" Pivetta intervenes.

"Well, yeah." Bryce concedes.

"The Mormon mafia?"

"God, shut the hell up. Not the Mormon fucking mafia, you fucking idiot."

"Jesus, what got into you? You swallow your breakfast dick down the wrong pipe, Nicky?"

"Shut up. Not my fault you're dumb as shit."

"I thought you guys had money in that?" Kingery re-enters the discussion, now wearing his practice t-shirt, pulling his shorts up around his hips. "Mormons. I thought you guys had money in it."

"Well." Bryce stalls. Kingery is right. It's part of the hypocrisy of it all. "Yeah. It was a whole thing. The Utah LDS weren't happy with it. They did it mostly to keep the mafia under control, I guess. Kick them out. I don't know. Long as you don't gamble yourself, it's fine, I imagine. I knew people who worked in the casinos. You know, when you need the money..."

"Right."

"So... What's it like? Vegas."

"I can't believe none of you guys have ever been."

"Hey. Broke minor leaguers until recently, dude." Pivetta motions around himself vaguely, presumably encompassing Knapp and Kingery.

"Yeah, sorry. Well. It's kind of like Phoenix, I guess, yeah."

Pivetta raises his fist in victory.

"Knew it."

"As in, it's like a big suburb in the desert. The desert's beautiful, though. I love it there, don't get me wrong."

"Too hot for me." Pivetta interjects, back to looking at his phone.

"Nobody cares, you Canadian fuck." Scotty spits a seed at him, for no fucking reason Bryce can discern, and Pivetta shields his face, calling Kingery a motherfucker.

“It’s gotta be weird growing up there, right?” Knapp enquires, looking genuinely interested now— bless his heart.

“Not really. I mean—“ Bryce, for a second, feels pulled back into his childhood. The dry desert heat at noon, so crushing sometimes they'd stay inside school at break, the dust storms that rolled around Frenchman Mountain and buried their neighborhood in a brown screen, and the sky at night, never fully dark, the bright lights of the Strip a few miles away brightening it up like a gigantic lantern. "It's not any different than any other place I guess, we weren't exactly rich, growing up, so..."

"You weren't?" Pivetta asks from the couch. He sounds a little surprised.

"Not really, no. My dad was an ironworker. My mom was a paralegal.”

"I always imagine Mormons are rich." Pivetta states.

"I guess in SLC they're a little richer. As a rule. Our branch —Vegas Mormons, I mean— we were more working class."

"Wow, alright. I always thought... you know, I mean you were on the SI cover and stuff." Knapp ventures, and then spins again, awkwardly.

Bryce knows what he means.  
He guesses it's normal to assume phenoms — whatever that word is about, really — come from rich-ass backgrounds. The time, the energy, the money you have to pour into your kid to allow them to do all this shit, the coaching, the travel teams, all of it, insane. Thank fuck teams would want him so bad they’d pay for everything, and even so— He remembers the hushed conversations he'd overhear late at night in the kitchen downstairs— the _mortgage_, and the _kid_ needs a new _bat_ and _overtime_ and _Bryce_ and he lay there in his bed underneath his wooden crucifix and his Texas Longhorns wallpaper and his cut out pictures of ballplayers and stared up at the ceiling like a corpse in its grave.

“Yeah, well...”

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to tell his audience of three about his life story, on account of what seems to be the whole rotation, flanked with Realmuto and half the coaching staff, crowding into the room hollering like excitable middle school girls.  
Eflin makes a beeline for Knapp, and sinks into the chair next to him. Pivetta gives everyone a dirty look from the couch, a bitter-ass ‘stuck in the fucking bullpen’ glare. Kingery finishes tying his laces, and heads out to the cages.  
Bryce is left at his locker to catch his own eye into the small tabletop mirror on his shelf, the one the guys would make fun of him for if they weren’t too scared to go after the team’s superstar signing yet.  
Little on his face has changed since he was a fifteen year old boy grinding out batting practice session upon session in 110 degree heat, always on the edge of heat exhaustion but wanting it all so bad he would have jumped off Sunrise Mountain if it could help his hitting. Well, he's got more facial hair. A better haircut, for sure.  
It's all a blur, his adolescence. A jumbled-up mix of boxes to check and tangled feelings and the sub-paranoid, uncomfortably truthful knowledge that he was being watched, that he was being _expected_. The confusion then was total; in the sheets of fog that fill his memory when he thinks back, it still is. The decisions he made had all been collateral to one goal for which he'd made himself a totem. And looking back, there were a lot of these, the confused decisions, all half-thought out and feverish, like hurried notes jotted down on a notepad or answers on the fly to questions in passing.  
And he'd woken up one day reaping what he'd sowed, the consequences of his cruise control choices on his hands, unable to recall where in himself he'd found it to make them.

And that was when he'd first seen Realmuto.

"Harp!"

Realmuto has ditched his pitching escort and now he's at his locker, which is right next to Bryce's. He's wearing that stupid, handsome, movie star snarling smile, that one that makes Bryce want to shove him away and pull him back in for an even stupider kiss.

"Noles hit a dinger in batting practice, apparently. Everyone's going over to the video room to see it, you want to come with?" He gives Bryce's ass a hearty slap.

Bryce can only smile back, the fucker's just impossible to resist even if Bryce wanted to.  
In a way, Realmuto is a lot like baseball which is a lot like gambling — because Bryce can't say no. But it's also different, because Bryce has been fucking around with him all season now, and so far, he's felt like practically every one of his rolls has been a winning one. And sure, the situation he's in right now isn't sustainable, and sure, it's probably pretty idiotic.  
But he didn't get to be a dumb teenager, not for real, not when he knew the weight of the eyes of the world and his family's financial future was on his shoulders at sixteen, not when he was Baseball's Chosen One by his sophomore year. Bryce thinks, as he follows the group down the tunnel, that it's never too late to catch up on his milestones.

\-----

Much like the thing with Realmuto, the thing with Kris had been wholly unavoidable.  
At the edge of fifteen years old, they were back in their respective schools and neighborhoods on either side of I-15, but more than a few things had changed.  
Bryce couldn't have pinpointed exactly how it started — the _thing_ itself, that is, because the first kiss he definitely remembered, Kris nervous about his school teammate's sister who seemed sweet on him, and Bryce wanting to tell him that just about all the girls in Vegas were sweet on him, that he could have turned a whole stadium's worth of teenage girls into a bag of corner store pick n mix just with a look of those blue eyes under hooded eyelids. And then the offer, if you're scared you won't be good at it, maybe you could practice on me.

It was all really, really easy. It all came very naturally, like riding a bike, only Bryce had had to learn how to ride a bike, but he'd never learned how to kiss other boys on the lips or how to want to see their bare tummies or how to softly palm at their crotch or the fact they'll jolt when you do it.

And yet.  
Yet Bryce was so good at this. Or it felt like he was. He was the greatest giver of messy hand jobs in Las Vegas. He was on Kris’s bed in his bedroom with a hand over Kris’s mouth because Kris was always so noisy when he came, and he was awesome at it.

It’s amazing how incredibly empty his brain was back then. About half his grey matter had been replaced with pure undiluted hormones, diffusing a steady flow of rampant sexual desire into his brain. Nothing about what he and Kris did, in his mind, was very serious or worthy of thought. It was simply just what was happening and it was pretty great, no need to consider or examine it any further. He had other matters to tend to, like trying not to flunk school, and punishing baseballs on a daily basis. His weekend handies with Kris were a nice break from it all.

But teenage warped concept of time aside, the real world was going to catch up eventually. One day, when Bryce's brother dropped him off in Kris's fancy neighborhood to hang out at Kris's big upper middle class house, on another one of the rare days off Bryce allowed himself, it became pretty apparent that the blissful carelessness of their affair had an expiring date.

"Hey, Bryce?" Kris asked, between two rounds of Mario Kart.

"Yeah?"

Kris was still the quiet type. He was still a major heartthrob in his school. He still didn't really like to go out, except maybe to the movies (but never a scary movie). He still practically ran away when girls came to talk to him, or at least, that's what he let on.  
Kris liked his routine, his nightly hitting sessions with his dad at eight sharp, waking up before eleven on the weekends; he liked his bed made, and his couch crumb-free, the team pictures on his wall straight and the trophies on his shelf aligned.  
His young life was perfectly arranged and he'd have been thoroughly uncool if it hadn't been for his looks and baseball abilities.  
Really, Bryce was the only kink in Kris's rope.

There was still something childlike about him, though as far as Bryce was concerned they might have both been adults. After all, they'd passed six feet and their peach fuzz was thickening on their jawline. Oh, and they liked touching dicks.  
Yet as Kris sat there crossed-legged on the bed with his Wii remote in his lap, his big blue eyes made him look much younger, which was somehow destabilizing.

"Um." He said. "I think I'm bisexual."

It was like Bryce's brain had been flushed away. He remembers total blankness.

"Oh." Bryce said, vacantly. "Okay."

And then he turned sixteen.

He had been listening in his morning LDS classes, kind of. But when you’re fifteen the existence of God takes the backseat to the existence of a set of much more important higher powers: the social hierarchies of high school, the arcane world of video games, and the ever-so-holy realm of masturbation.  
However, something would happen that would bring the fear of the Lord and the nagging certainty of mortality back to weigh on Bryce Harper’s young (if broad) shoulders, and that thing was, in the most unexpected of ways, a home run.  
A towering home run, at Tropicana Field, in Tampa Bay.  
Caught on tape, uploaded to YouTube, and all of a sudden, he was in full view of the world, and the all-seeing eyes of God.  
Talk about a revelation.

Kris's own revelation a few months prior had already shaken the foundations of the delicious self-obliviousness Bryce had steeped in so far. He'd tried to shove it down, tried to keep pretending that his and Kris's make-out sessions were, at best, fooling around, and at worst, experimentation.  
But now— now this was serious business.  
He was going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He was becoming simply too good for high school baseball. There were thousands of strangers judging his character on message boards and in comment sections right now.  
The world had caught up to him and was knocking on his door. And everything was slowly taking physical form, emerging from the haze of half-shaped, short-sighted teenage aloofness with the same terrifying certainty with which Kris had articulated the syllables that spelled “bisexual”.  
His time had run out. If he was ever not responsible for his actions before his Heavenly Father and before the riveted eyes of the public, that page had been turned. Nothing that he had done or was doing was innocent, or free of consequences anymore.  
Now Bryce had to answer a question.

Was he gay?

Bryce wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer, but the evidence was there.  
He just hadn't been able to understand why the other boys were so interested in girls, not when they had each other around, not when men looked, and felt, the way they did. It seemed insane. He'd kept waiting around for it to appear to him like Gabriel to Mary. But it never had. And it was becoming increasingly obvious that normal guys did not see other boys _that way_; and it was becoming increasingly worrying that Bryce _did_.

Why did he feel like this?  
What did it all say about him, as a man, or even, as a person? What was, really, the nature of his homosexual desires?

Was it self-obsession? Bathed in praise and lack of challenge, had his overstimulated ego grown to the point of perversion? Was he so engrossed in his own image he looked for his reflection in his partner?  
Was it femininity? Did he wish, not so deep inside, that he could wear that makeup he loved to try on in middle school, or the skirts he stole from his sister’s closet, out in the open? Did he wish he were a girl?  
Was it, even, pure and untainted evil? Why had he let himself betray God’s covenant, which he dutifully learned about every morning, why had he walked so decidedly into sin without an ounce of a second thought?

Obviously, there was something irreparably wrong with him that nothing, nothing could ever fix. Something in his brain had snapped. And with no transition offered whatsoever, a feeling he'd thought reserved for dreams of wetting yourself at school flooded his chest, and suddenly for the first time his body felt too small for him.

The world had changed, and nothing would ever feel good ever again.  
Shame had him choked at the collar.  
And it wasn't going to let go.

He'd thought life was uncomplicated; he'd let himself float unseen, displaying what people cared for, letting flow what they didn't.  
That couldn't go on, so much was clear for a sixteen year old in his first ever existential crisis.  
There were two diverging paths before him. Either he followed in Kris's footsteps and decided he was gay, and that would be a whole other problem for him to deal with; or he was going to have to stop all of this nonsense and set himself straight.  
Literally.

Well, the next time Kris and him got together, Bryce could barely sit on the bed with him.

"The heck's gotten into you, man?" Kris pleaded, his refusal to swear now striking Bryce as a near-indictment of his own bad practice of the Teachings, and he felt shame, and annoyance on top of the whole lot of other things he already had to deal with.

"I can't do it anymore, okay? I'm not gay."

Kris's eyebrows shot up, his lips puckering in skepticism.

"Right."

"I'm not, so I shouldn't be doing any of this stuff with you, it's not right."

"Okay, I'm not following. Is it because I told you I'm bi?" There he was, T-shirt half-off around his neck, looking ridiculous.

"I—" Bryce thought hard about how to put it, his thoughts jumbling up and tangling until he wasn't sure whether it was or wasn't. "I'm just not gay, I'm just not. So I can't be doing this."

Truly eloquent. Kris frowned.

"Okay, be a little objective here. You like doing it, right?"

"Sure..." Bryce conceded, already knowing what comes next.

"Dude, you like boys!" Kris fleered.

"Don't too!" Bryce barked back, so stymied he couldn't hold the childishness back.

"Please!" Kris scoffed, rolling his eyes, like some sort of _girl_, oh God, something had gone so wrong in Bryce's life, and he needed to get away, and felt guilty for dragging Kris into it, because look at him now.

"Look, I— I'm sorry. I just can't anymore. Lots of things are about to change. I mean, we were just having fun, right? I just need to clean my act up, man." Bryce explained, keeping his voice low, thinking somehow it would make it all easier— and less obvious that his motivations were less than honest. "It won't end well if I don't."

Kris gave him the most intense look he and Bryce had ever shared.

"So is that really what you want?" he asked, and he was sincere.

Bryce swallowed.

"Yeah."

And he was lying.

He met Kayla two weeks later.

\-----

When Bryce came up to the Majors, he was nineteen years old, 6'3, and he was immediately assigned to being Jayson Werth's personal rookie.  
And Werth was a fucking hard ass.

Werth was an old-timer. A World Series champion. A guy who'd spent seven years in the minor leagues. A guy who'd signed with a division rival and didn't care one bit. Werth had been there, done that, and took every opportunity available to remind Bryce of that fact.

A mistake in front of Jayson Werth, in true old school baseball fashion, was a mistake a rookie did not want to make. Most of the time, Bryce made stupid choices out of cluelessness. That did not make Werth go any easier on him. Sometimes Bryce felt like a misbehaving dog that had pissed on the floor and Werth was there every time to rub his face in it.  
But a lot of the rest of the time, it was just like being back home, being a mischievous little brother again, letting Werth call him a fucking punk ass bitch and smack him round the back of the head when he stepped out of line. He was tough on him; didn't let him wallow, didn't let him get complacent, kept him humble. And although Bryce sometimes felt like punching him, he knew humility was a virtue in both baseball and religion, which, at human height, were much the same after all. Affinity for the ritual, swathes of peoples sitting and praying in a large space together, and every day repeating actions to appease the forces raging inside and outside of their body. Sets of rules to respect, written or spoken; codes to live by, demons to ward off, miracles to make.  
Pews and bleachers were indistinguishable when Bryce walked up to the plate. Hitting was a divine experience for a heretic god.

And so Bryce retained some trappings of heresy, because it was only natural. It was the way baseball had to be.

If he was worshipping anyone, though, Bryce knew who it would be.  
A couple months into his major league experience, Bryce had noticed a new addition to Werth’s locker.  
The bat was beautiful maple, tinted black, Marucci label on the handle, and a scrawled signature and name in silver on the barrel.

Chase Utley.

Less than two hours up the I-95, Philadelphia’s executioner was soldiering through his ninth year in the same city, unfazed by injury setbacks.

His whole being dwarfed and dumbfounded Bryce. There was something about him— everything about him, really. The hustle, the hard slides, the diligence with the bat. The diving stops, the big moments, his ability to always be in the right place at the right time. And the little smirk when he took his base on balls unflinching, the well-maintained stone-faced persona, the sheer inability to give a damn about what anyone thought of him.

Bryce envied that in particular: Utley’s capacity to be hated and wearing it, that smug but humble satisfaction he liked to display when plays that would earn him boos on the road earned him ovations in South Philadelphia. He was proud, he was loved, he was quiet about it, and he couldn’t be bothered to be concerned about any of the rest.  
Bryce couldn’t seem to let those things roll off his back. It was like they cut him to the fucking bone every time. He didn’t want to be hated. He knew it was inevitable, baseball being baseball, but that knowledge unsettled him.  
And somewhere between the magazine cover and the big leagues it seemed the whole wide world had decided it detested him, for various reasons real or imagined.

If Bryce were Utley he wouldn’t have given it a single thought. He wouldn't have given a fuck. He would have gotten on playing and let them do the talking if they so pleased.  
But as hard as Bryce tried and moderately succeeded to keep a straight face, inside he was raring to prove people wrong. No amount of Werth and himself trying to shape him after Utley in unspoken unison would change the nature of his heart. Utley had something he didn’t: serenity.

“He’s sincere with himself.” Werth had half-elaborated, cryptically. “He knows exactly who he is.”

And because of that, Bryce knew he could never achieve what Utley had.  
Obvious reasons inferred.  
He could try, though.

So he’d grabbed the bat from Werth’s locker, and he’d taken it with him to the field.  
He'd held it in his hands and imagined Utley’s own instead, calloused, slim fingers curled around the handle.  
A long shiver had coursed through him.

Werth had naturally smacked him round the head when he’d discovered he’d touched it.

“You fucking brat.” He’d grunted indignantly, ripping the bat from his hands. “You’re lucky that game went well for you.”

Bryce had hit like a _god_. He’d hit like _Chase Utley_. Those two were the _same thing_.

Of course, that wasn't the first of Bryce's interest for Utley. Baseball-wise, while there were several schools of thought on him, Bryce was of the opinion that Utley left everything on the diamond: and that it was how the game ought to be played, body and soul into the dirt, throwing yourself wholly and purely into the task at hand, zero regrets. He'd wanted to be his high school's Utley, he'd wanted to be known for playing hard and to the end. He'd cut Utley's image out of a 2006 issue of Bryan's SI subscription, and Utley flippantly leaned over his bat above his bed, sticking his chin up at the world with that mischievous simper on his lips. "Fuck you. I'm better than you."  
A teenaged Bryce had stood in front of the mirror and tried to replicate the pose, staring intently at Utley's lean body and how the straight lines of his full length pants hung off his legs, arm akimbo in a nonchalant way he could never quite replicate. His perpetual failure to emulate what he thought was the coolest off-field image in baseball notwithstanding, he'd kept gazing at Philadelphia's star second baseman daily, as if he could somehow channel his essence from it. Kept looking, transfixed by the man in a variety of ways he didn't really care to untangle.

In contact with Werth, who had spent a number of seasons with Utley as his teammate, his obsession had been reignited.  
And so for a few days after the bat incident, his routine consisted of coming in, shooting the shit, and then, at batting practice, quizzing Werth on how Utley did this, or if Utley did that. After a week, Werth was starting to look at him with a weird set of his eyebrows when he scooted next to him in the back of the cage to panhandle for more nuggets of Utley wisdom, and though Bryce couldn't identify what the particular expression meant, he knew he didn't like it one bit.  
So he stopped.  
But he couldn't let go of Utley just yet.

"Do you have any more of those Utley bats?" he asked the following day, as they stood at their neighboring locker. "I really liked that bat."

Werth gave him a look. A different one. Bryce felt small all of a sudden, wanted to scramble away like a child. Not that he was anything more than a child in Werth's eyes.

"You really like Chase, don't you, kid?" Werth asked, something like suspicion in his voice.

Bryce's heart went haywire, pitter-patter against the inside of his ribcage, because this couldn't be happening.  
He'd given all that stuff up. He hadn't had a slip-up since he and Kris had more or less fallen out, more from the obvious obstacle of Bryce going to JuCo and then getting drafted and shipped halfway across the country than from any real resentment between the two of them. He'd shaped up. He'd gotten a girlfriend back home. He'd made himself the perfect flag-bearer for the off-kilter modern Mormon young man, at least on the surface.  
So _yeah_, maybe despite all his efforts, Kris had been right, maybe he couldn't will himself to be straight, maybe he stole looks in the showers, _maybe_ that thing for Utley included a few nightly hard-ons, but he could damn well pretend to be straight, because that was the least he could do.  
And now Werth already had him figured out.

"Hey." Werth said, tapping him on the back of the shoulder. "Relax, kid. It's fine. Didn't mean nothing by it."

Bryce noticed he was so tense his back could have been a plank of hardwood. His shoulders' muscles were taut, his fingers clutched into position, frozen like a deer in headlights.  
Embarrassed, he slackened. Fucking great, now it was even more obvious that Werth had struck a nerve.

"I just— uhh—" He vainly tried to clarify, grabbling for words to absolve himself for an obsession whose nature he couldn't even fully face himself.

"It's okay, kid, no need to explain yourself." Werth shrugged, carrying on with his pre-game routine. "We all got our heroes."

There was something a little too nonchalant about Werth. It was clear to Bryce he'd noticed something was up, but for some reason he'd decided to go Bryce's way and ignore it. Thank fuck for that.

"I do have more bats. Not signed, though, you leave that motherfucking thing alone." He gestured to the bat, which was back in his locker. "It's mine. Not some fucking punk kid's. Those bats— they're straight from his locker a couple years ago, I pinched 'em when I was packing up after the Giants loss. You won't get better mojo. Touched by The Man himself. But you gotta promise to tear it up with them."

Bryce's heart hadn't completely slowed down yet, but Werth was looking him in the eyes now, as if to shake on their informal contract. So he nodded, smiled with the corner of his lips as best as he could when he'd been on the verge of a fucking fainting fit just moments before —honest to God, it was embarrassing— and Werth nodded back.

"Alright, kid. Don't fucking disappoint me."

As soon as the Maruccis were back in his hands, Bryce started getting hotter than the sun, and Werth couldn't do much more than give him a fatherly pat on the helmet every time he trotted back to the dugout from his trip around the bases. Bryce just covertly smiled, and looked at the barrel of his bat, reading the name over in his head like a mantra.

The main thing was that Werth was a good teacher. Of course, Bryce had known that without Werth he'd have been lost, and that the veteran had been assigned to the task of shepherding him for a reason. After all, Bryce still felt so young sometimes, despite his best efforts. He missed home. He missed his family. Sometimes the pressure of being baseball's most anticipated rookie weighed on his shoulders so heavily he felt like he might explode, and ruin everything. Sometimes he slipped up in front of the media, sometimes it was on the field. Some aspects of him were still unpolished. But, as the outfield coach had thoughtfully remarked to him after he messed up on a fly early in the year, rocks on the beach only get smooth with time. Some things just take making mistakes to fix, and Bryce already didn't have a lot of those. It was nothing to worry about. After that heartfelt conversation, Werth had sat him down and given him the flip side of the coin for some tough love. It worked. Werth was an ideal mentor.

That much became clear a week or so after Bryce had cemented his streak as something to watch.

The universal dislike he seemed to attract wasn't limited to crowds. For some reason, he was the subject of a vendetta from players as well. As much as Werth tried to get him to manage himself and take it (Utley style, again), it was hard to not get angry. It put him perpetually on edge, hormonal emotions still skin-deep and showing on his sleeve. All these guys projected stuff onto him that had nothing to do with him and none of them seemed to be interested in what kind of person, what kind of player he actually was. The whole thing was completely fucking unwarranted. And worse, umpires seemed in on it, determined to rein in a rookie for offenses that Bryce was pretty sure were also inexistent. It felt hopeless. Werth had warned him about not being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bryce needed to keep his cool. But he felt like he was constantly boiling over from the sheer injustice.

And then there was the incident.  
Tough game. Bad home plate ump, for both sides. Rain delays, slippery grass. A brutal stretch for the other team. There were a lot of excuses. A lot of fucking excuses.  
But when Bryce hit the home run through the thinnest returning droplets, he still wasn't expecting the ball to skirt his helmet the following at-bat. Nor did he expect the following pitch to hit him squarely in the leg, spurring the crowd to roar out.  
Confused, he looked towards the mound. He hadn't stared at the ball. He hadn't stalled. He hadn't even looked anywhere else but his feet while rounding the bases. So what the hell had that been for?  
The pitcher was looking back with an ugly snarl, Bryce still out of the box, trying to manage his heartbeat which had uncontrollably spiked when he'd heard the high-pitched whistle of the pitch nearly hitting him in the head.

He looked down at the catcher. The guy just shrugged, silently— impossible to tell if he was playing dumb or if he really was a fucking idiot. So, slowly, Bryce bent down to take his shin guard off.

"Jesus! Take your fucking base already you fucking cocksucker!"

Bryce's head whipped up, his heart dropped right down to his stomach. On the mound the pitcher was glaring, ready to dish out more.  
Bryce couldn't think anymore; everything was overflowing from his chest, all his organs frantic and his chest tight and caving in on itself in rage and fear.

"What the _fuck_ did you call me?!" He yelled back, dropping his hands down to his side, tightly clenched fists dangling at his legs as he stood back up and took a step along the first base line.

"Fucking get over it you fucking faggot!"

It was too much. That was it. It was too fucking much.  
Bryce was going to do it. He was going to prove them all fucking right. That was it. Nobody got to call him that. They didn't know. Fuck, they didn't get to call him that. They didn't _know_, they _couldn't_ know, _did_ they know, _how_ did they know?

Before he knew it he was halfway to the mound, the bastard pitcher had thrown off his glove, and there were two big strong arms wrapped around his midriff, holding him back.

"The fuck do you think you're fucking doing?" Werth growled as he forcibly pulled Bryce away and the rest of the two teams crowded around them, hysterically staring each other down as the crowd roared.

Bryce flailed, his heels dragging on the grass as Werth hauled him off towards the dugout.

"Let me fucking go!"

"Nuh-uh, no fucking way."

"Fucking let me fucking go did you hear what he fucking _called_me—"

"Everybody heard what he fucking called you, kid."

"Fucking let me _go_ then—"

Werth tightened his grip sharply, stealing Bryce's breath with a hiccup.

"Bryce." He said firmly into his ear. "Bryce. Chill the fuck out. Right now."

Gasping for air, Bryce felt his body somehow unwind a little, felt his head getting fuzzy, like static, and tears prickling at his eyes as the teams faced off threateningly along the first base line, the umpires trying to break off the stare contest. Werth's calm, composed breath swelled his chest against Bryce's back and blew against his shoulder. He couldn't see his face but he could tell it was completely fucking deadpan.

"But—" He finally articulated, trying to swallow back any sign that he might be on the verge of sobbing in anger and panic. Because he was. Embarrassingly.

"No. Not a single word. You go up there once they clear out and you take your base. Understood?"

"But he—"

"Understood?" Werth repeated, louder this time.

Bryce sucked a stunted breath in, not answering just yet, still dizzy and buzzing behind his forehead. Who did Werth think he fucking was, to constantly be treating him like a fucking toddler?

"You can't give them anything like this... They'll say the lady doth protest too much." Werth said quietly, and Bryce didn't have a single idea what he meant.

The players had slowly started making their way back to the dugout, the managers the only ones left on the field to gesticulate at the umpires. The bastard pitcher was nowhere to be seen, the catcher just standing there at home plate. Bryce was breathing deep. Listening to his lungs. His head feeling blank, a residual bass sound vibrating lightly against his skull.  
Gently, Werth released him. Fucking finally.

When Bryce glanced back, his face was impassible. Just as he drew it up, he thought unnervingly.

"Do not get yourself thrown out again." he commanded. "Is that clear?"

Wordlessly, Bryce nodded. There truly was no point protesting. He knew when to accept defeat with Werth.  
Davey gave him a pat on the back as he hopped back into the dugout.

"That motherfucker's out." He assured. "Get back up there, kid."

At home, the clubhouse always emptied out fairly quickly after a mid-series win. Most of the guys were older; they had families to get home to. The younger guys, who were all still noticeably older than Bryce, and not underage, usually all went out together to have a quiet drink at the flavor of the week anonymous corporate bar. It was hardly the hard-partying major league lifestyle that Bryce and his friends had imagined during their nineties-and-noughties childhoods. No clubbing Barry Zitos, no womanizing Derek Jeters. The name of the game was health and consistency now, and that did not compute with benders every night.

Anyway, the point was that he was alone at his locker and couldn't bring himself to drive home to his empty apartment and video chat Kayla and have to explain what happened.

He didn't really anticipate that Werth would still be there when he walked into the clubhouse from the hallway that led to Video Room 3.

"You still here?" He remarked, strolling to his locker and throwing his hoodie on, shoving a small folded signature of printed images of his swing into his bag. First of all that was supposed to be Bryce’s line, and second of all— how old did he have to be not to use screenshots? "You should be in bed." He gave Bryce's chair a light kick. "Out."

Bryce just sighed, spinning around to turn his back to him. He felt a lot like a sulky teenager, but he didn't have the will or energy to put on a face right now. And, after all, he was only 19, wasn’t he? He had a fucking right to this.

"Okay." Werth was _fucking_ grimacing, Bryce could hear it in his voice, the half-hearted annoyance. "Wild guess. You're still worked up about that thing earlier?"

Bryce huffed, frankly pissed off that _that_ was his reaction. He knew heartfelt and soft wasn't Werth's style, but sometimes he wished that for one fucking time he'd drop the hard-nosed veteran thing. There was no one who could understand what Bryce was feeling right now, and a little compassion would have gone a long damn fucking way.

"Right. You really are just like my eight year old at home. C'mon. Turn around. Let's have a little talk."

That probably hid something else. Werth was going to straighten him up and teach him how to master post-fight aloofness or something, with a colorful gallery of harmless insults to boot. Nevertheless, Bryce spun back around with another sigh.  
Werth was sitting in his own chair, leaning forwards slightly, one hand planted on his knee. It was either condescending or surprisingly fatherly, and certainly disconcerting to see. Bryce had to remain cautious: the fucker could prey on vulnerability if he showed too much. He was only trying to help Bryce, of course, but God damn did it get unbearable in times like these.

"What." Bryce muttered, not making eye contact.

"You're really predictable, you know that? It's a flaw. It's going to bleed into baseball eventually."

"Oh, _fuck_ you." Bryce groaned, going to stand up.

"Shut the fuck up and sit down." There was no negotiating with that tone, so Bryce reluctantly let his ass hit the leather again. "You know how I told you Chase could just let all that shit fly right over his head?"

The mention of Chase did pick up Bryce's interest in the conversation. He glanced up just so, but immediately went back to staring at his knees, too chicken to cross Werth's glare.

"Yeah. A couple of times." He mumbled. He didn't need reminding that he couldn't do what Utley could. That no matter how hard he tried, he let shit get to him every single fucking time.

"And how I told you it was because he was honest with himself?"

"Yeah, whatever."

"Don't talk back." God, Bryce could have fucking killed him for that one. "What I meant, is he’s not wasting energy lying to himself and trying to keep up appearances. That's the most important lesson the man's gonna teach you, kid. Forget about the hitting or the bats or the all-out fucking breakneck baserunning you take after him, apparently. That one's the one you want to think," Werth reached out, and tapped his index finger on Bryce's temple, which almost made Bryce flinch. "Really think about."

Bryce squinted, and lifted up his head. What the fuck was Werth trying to get at? Was he supposed to feel insulted? Was he supposed to feel reassured? What kind of advice was that? He felt vaguely attacked, though. Vaguely threatened. _Lying to himself_?

"The hell does that mean?" Bryce balked, his nose wrinkling in annoyance.

Werth rolled his eyes, shaking his head. He was so fucking irritating sometimes, so fucking condescending Bryce could have strangled the old guy on the spot.

"Right."

“What?” Bryce retaliated, more than a bit miffed. “It’s not my fault you’re being all cryptic and shit."

That tore a heavy sigh from Werth, and he mumbled something about stupid-ass punk kids with stupid hair, which Bryce did not care for at all. He crossed his arms against his chest defensively. Felt judged. Felt vulnerable. Just wanted to get up and leave. But for some reason he just sat there as Werth leaned in again, confessionally.

"Look, I know it hurt when that sonuvabitch called you that, kid. But it’s nothing personal, alright? No one’s onto you."

Bryce felt a pang in his chest, like someone had dropped a cartoon anvil in his stomach.  
Shit. So that was what this was all about.

Werth knew. He'd known.  
_Fuck._

"Shut up." Bryce blurted out, feeling panic again, icy in his arms and legs.

"Hey. Easy there." Werth hardened, but fuck him, he deserved that.

"No— the fuck are you trying to say?" Bryce's voice came out almost like a yelp, which was fucking embarrassing, but he could barely control the anxious ball of tears in his throat, so this was probably the best he could do.

“Man, is emotional management the name of the fucking game for you.” Werth groaned. “It’s fine, you don’t have to worry about it. I get it, you know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bryce said, as assertively as physically possible without his voice shaking pathetically.

“Bryce.” He couldn't tell if Werth was exasperated or just felt plain sorry for him, and he didn't know which one was worse. "Come on."

Werth's big hand landed on Bryce's shoulder, reminded him of his pops, reminded him that he was small in a way the constant, daily jabs of _kid_ and _rook_ didn't, and for some reason, it just broke the motherfucking dam.  
Bryce looked for words, tried to protest, but all his defenses were suddenly down, and he couldn't find anything in his head to help defend his good name, everything held back like he was gasping for breath after colliding with the floor, hard. Tears welled up in his eyes, and Bryce felt himself deflate in defeat.  
It was all Werth's fault, the stubborn motherfucker.

"You don't get it." Bryce croaked out, hugging himself reflexively. He felt so fucking exposed. He hated it, wanted to run away, but his legs were like lead.

"There's a lot of shit you don't know about me, kid."

Bryce had to look up, because that was kind of an unbearable fucking answer right now, and he wasn’t sure he could keep from just exploding right there and then.

“The _fuck_,” he articulated, “does that fucking mean?” He was tired. He was confused. He was scared, God damn, he was scared as shit, shiveringly upset, and angry at Werth because he definitely did not understand, could not understand, and maybe he was Bryce’s substitute parent in this godforsaken city but it was rich of him to pretend he could fix anything about this part of Bryce, which was impossible to fix— he’d tried.

Anyway, that made Werth lean back into his chair, and take a deep breath in. Bryce wasn’t sure if he was trying to keep his cool or something, but he probably thought Bryce was dumb, and of course this was another falsehood about him that Bryce couldn’t bear knowing people thought. He was _smart_. He’d had a 3.5 GPA.

"Right. You like Chase, don't you?"

_What_ was Werth's _issue_? Always bringing up Utley. Utley had nothing to do with any of this. Was he taunting Bryce over his— his _crush_?

"I— yes I do, he's a great ballplayer, alright, that doesn't mean—"

Werth raised his hand to stop him.

"But you like Chase?"

"YES!" Bryce snapped. "What _about_ it?"

"Well," Werth turned his palms up to the ceiling as if to demonstrate something. "Chase likes dick."

Well, Werth might as well have dropped a bomb right there between the both of them. It took a few seconds for Bryce to compute what he'd said, his brain running in slow-motion from the impact of the blast. Surely he'd heard wrong. Surely Werth was joking, or lying, there was no way he'd just said that.

"You— I—" he stumbled, at a loss. "What? Shut up. Get out."

"He does. I'm serious."

"That's not true. You're leading me around because I'm a rookie and— that's not fucking nice, I'm—"

"Cut the shit. Of course it's true. I mean, I would know." Werth's mouth twisted in a half-smirk, and he pointed down at his crotch with both index fingers, a filthy expression on his face.

"You _what_?! No WAY."

"I spent seven years single in the minors, kid. On the road you take what you can get. See, this is what you lost out on when they fucking fast-tracked you. Put 26 guys in a bus for long enough and they get so bored— _so_ bored and horny— something's gotta happen."

"You... You..." Bryce repeated, just dumbfounded. "You and Chase? You? _Chase?_"

"Turn it down a notch, kid, you're gonna pop a stiff one."

That was just fucking mean. Bryce felt like he's going to have a god-damned panic attack. He felt paralyzed, eyes darting around to make sure he wasn't dreaming. And he wasn't, was he?

"But... Yeah. He's keener than I am, but I had my day." Werth admitted.

Keener? Bryce's brain warped into overdrive. He imagined Utley down on his knees, looking up, his mouth open, tongue wet and pink and— or, or Utley above him, that trademark smirk he'd spent hours trying to replicate in the mirror, strong shoulders rolling, hot breath on Bryce's neck, slender rough raspy hands on Bryce's hips—

"He..." Bryce finally vocalized, trying hard to rip himself from the impromptu fantasy. "He's okay with you telling people this?"

"What, that he swings both ways? I'm sure you'll make wise use of the information."

"And you—"

"And if you're wondering if I still fool around with guys, no, I don't. Too complicated. I'm too old. Besides, I'm married. I really shouldn't be doing anything like that. I know it doesn't stop most guys, but I'm getting up there. Gotta get serious about my family, you know."

Bryce just sat there.  
He thought about Kayla in Ohio. He thought about the Church. He thought about Werth and Utley, just a little older than him, fooling around in their minor league uniforms, and maybe they’d keep the stirrups on, and—

“You’re so fucking red. You look like I just told you I fucked your dad.” Werth snorts. “Guess I kinda did—“

“Hey!” Bryce yapped, swatting his hand at him. “Stop it. It’s complicated.”

For a moment, the whole thing was almost funny.

“Look. Just think about what I told you. Everything, alright? At the end of the day, I’m here for you, kid. That’s kind of what they pay me for, if we’re being honest."

Bryce looked up. Werth was leaning forwards. His hazel eyes had a strange sort of tenderness in them. Bryce wanted it to be okay. Bryce wanted Werth to be able to help.

He probably couldn't, though. They'd both said it: it was complicated. Bryce knew what he _had_ to do, and it wasn't what he _wanted_ to do. But he was in the Majors, and staying there was the most important part.  
He knew he couldn't have it all, even then at 19. Choices had been made; and he had to continue to make them. He was a Mormon and he was going to marry a woman and have children. That was set in stone. He wished he could be like Utley, or Werth, wished he could be _himself_, whoever that was, sometimes he couldn't remember anymore. Wished he could talk about messing around with men like it was a semester abroad in Europe.  
He wished he could be free, free to do what he wanted, free to be 19 like his friends back home. Free from heaven and hell, free from rules, free from dreams. Free from even the things he’d fought so hard to get, free from the things he was lucky to have.

But he wasn’t free.  
And he’d never been.

\------

Kris wants a big wedding.

“Matching suits. They gotta be blue. It’ll match our eyes.”

They haven’t seen each other since Bryce was back in Vegas during the offseason. He’d stayed in Philadelphia as long as he could, until the cold got to him too bad and he had to practically run away back to warmth.  
His house in Chestnut Hill is a little gem. A perfect bachelor’s pad, spacious but contained. Old town charm and modern style. He has Kris over for an old school session of fancy pizza from the local Italian and a Netflix movie neither of them really cares about. The Cubs are in town.

Kris is a huge fucking romantic. Bryce has always known this. He wants to get engaged on a beach, likes candle dinners, and swoons for roses. His favorite movie is When Harry Met Sally. Despite the fact he also likes girls, is all about cars and looks a lot less camp, Kris might be gayer than Bryce.

Falling out was inevitable, much like falling in had been. Bryce hadn't exactly helped things, but they had been from two different worlds: Kris, comfortably middle class, headed to college in San Diego, and Bryce, living on the edge of the desert, in a hurry out of high school. They'd maintained contact after their travel ball summer partly out of the sheer power of teenage hormones. When Bryce had gone to the East Coast and Kris to the West, it had seemed obvious that with their common interest in dick-touching no longer incentivizing them there was no point in trying to maintain anything.  
But beyond it all, Bryce had liked Kris: shared his sweet tooth, delighted in his genuine love of Disney musical numbers, envied his low-strung, low-key attitude and his unexpected sassy streak.  
He hadn't exactly had the time to miss Kris, though. By the time Kris has been called up to the big leagues to save the Chicago Cubs from the sewers of the NL Central, Bryce had won the Rookie of the Year, been an All-Star, been declared a bust and a brat, been Temple-endowed, had gotten engaged, had had a complete mental breakdown, had cancelled a wedding, and had arrived at Spring Training feeling both lighter and angrier than he had ever been before.

Shit, it had been a busy few years. It had been a long time since his conversation with Werth that fateful night. Bryce wasn't the same person he had been when he'd tried to refute himself in Kris's bedroom six years before. He wasn’t the same person he was the night Werth had taught him there was a way for him to be less fucking miserable and he'd pushed it away. He was maybe a little closer to the person he had been when he and Kris met, though.  
The whole thing had snuck up on him: suddenly they were playing each other in a whole other way than what Bryce had grown to expect, like a mirage in the desert he couldn't shake off.  
It was a long way from Las Vegas, a long way from Kris's house, a long way from the youth fields where their travel teams had played. And Kris was a man now, lean and broad and taller than Bryce, jaw stubbly, those blue eyes and that movie-star smile even more striking now. There they were, Kris the inevitable Rookie of the Year, Bryce of a fiery track to a MVP season for the books. Kris, ever so knowledgeable of his own self; Bryce, newly graduated into resigned acceptance of who he was.

They were two Vegas kids with common ground and spotlight sunburns. Within minutes of reuniting it was like they were fourteen again, but fully grown into their own, no longer so awkward in their minds and bodies, so much wiser but still so damn stupid, and it felt good to Bryce to have someone like him who truly understood, someone his age, a real buddy.

Bryce thinks this is also what he likes about his new clubhouse, and about Realmuto. His whole life, his whole career, he'd been the kid, the baby. And then, as time stretched on and the new wave of prospects shored up in Washington, he'd found himself in an uncomfortable middle ground, too young to be a mentor and too old to be a partner in crime, standing alone in a class of his own. He was only 25 then but felt as if he'd lived a thousand lifetimes, between baseball and personal turmoil.  
In Philadelphia, he measures up. Maybe he doesn't have the bush league-woven ties others might have acquired, but at least he's not spending his time having to hang out with the vets like a socially inept little brother. Hoskins, tall and pink-cheeked like an old baby powder ad, has made sure he would integrate, and he's grateful for it all, for Hoskins' friendship and his vigilant eye. He's rarely had a friend like that, who pays so much attention to how he's feeling, and to whom he can relate. Not a father figure — a real brother.

And then, there's Realmuto. The Werth to his Utley. Bryce has been thinking about what exactly is so attractive about him. Well, beyond his body; he's been over that one: he's handsome as hell, big and strong with those deep blue eyes, muscles toned to grecian perfection, yadda fucking yadda. But there are other things, things that appeal to Bryce especially. There's the fact he's a catcher, something that Bryce, no matter how he tries to spin it to himself, knows has to do with the fact he'd been a catcher too until professional baseball had assessed that he was much too precious to risk planting at home plate. Ever since, something has seemed desperately alluring about the position. He can't help but stare longingly at the burly men strapping on the gear, sitting strong and calculating on the field, wielding invisible power over the game. The catcher is so important, yet often he receives so little attention. Exhausted by ten years of limelight, Bryce has gotten to the point in his life where quiet excellence looks like a pretty damn good deal. And, well, excellent, Realmuto definitely fucking is. So it's not just a physical thing, but it's not just a baseball thing either, Bryce wouldn't say. Realmuto is perfectly pleasing. He's quietly funny, a straightforward kind of guy, not afraid to say what he thinks but not too bold that he'll hurt anyone. He's steadfast, and he's a riot to play golf with. Bryce admires him, respects him, likes him. They're _friends_.

Yet, because he's stupid, but not crazy, Bryce wouldn't say he's in love.  
Kris, on the other hand, hasn't stopped talking about Anthony Rizzo like he was his Prince Charming for the past five years.

"We're not doing it in Florida. It'll be Vegas or Chicago. I told him I'm not going to get married in that swamp."

Kris has it all planned out in his head. He's had years to think about it. Years to know he might want something out of this option, that he might end up going for a man. Years of him and Rizzo's half-obvious relationship.  
Bryce, on the other end, wasted six years of his life trying to pretend he was something he wasn't, out of fear, out of a misplaced sense of compulsion. He's lost so much time to his own fucking stubbornness, to his own overflowing emotions, to the situation he'd let himself tie himself into. And he's so damn mad at himself sometimes, for building his own prison cell, for stifling himself to the point of suffocation, gasping for air from morning to night, just getting by until he couldn't fucking take it anymore, until everything in his life was affected, even baseball. God, even baseball. He was so dumb at 19. So fucking short-sighted that he'd driven himself to implosion.   
And Kris rambles on, sweetly, about the color of the napkins and the first dance and the pocket squares. The wholesome motherfucker makes Bryce want to smile. He imagines himself at Kris's wedding, everything about it perfect and him sitting at a table with a white linen cloth (not off-white, _white_, Kris insists, chopping his hand vigorously). He imagines himself wondering if he wants the same for himself, if he's jealous, or envious, or whatever.  
He'd come so close once. He'd done the wedding planning. He'd pulled every stop. And as he approached the terminus he'd realized where exactly he was headed and jumped out. When he thinks back to that 2014 season, he remembers feeling trapped. He remembers the tight feeling in his chest and the anxiety at the field, and the piss poor results at the plate, and Werth giving him the side glance that says "told you so". He remembers thinking back to his rookie year bat, his Utley bat, the name scribbled away and replaced with his own in a half-hearted act of wishful thinking. Longing still to be like his hero, but too cowardly to take the steps to resemble him. Just like he'd once felt too small for his own body, that whole year he had felt like he was too large for it. Until he'd had the guts to do the right thing and walk away.  
It hadn't felt right, of course. But then again it hadn't been right from the start. He had to stop the cycle that he was imposing on the both of them.

And 2015 had come and felt like a liberation.  
There was the MVP season, of course. There was the lightness in his chest. There was the freedom. And there was Realmuto.

Well, in Bryce's vision of Kris's perfect gay summer wedding, Realmuto isn't with him. Couldn't be. Because Realmuto is Catholic, and Realmuto is married, and at the end of the day that's what matters: the wedding band and the silver cross he leaves on the nightstand when he and Bryce fuck, the way their thing almost never happens at home.

But it doesn't matter. He doesn't need more.  
Because Bryce is _happy_. He's happy, he still can't get enough of it. After years in ignorance, living underground of himself, he's happy, he's been happy since that unbelievable season that made him feel like he was on top of the world, that made him feel like he could have taken flight.  
He refuses to hate himself for liking men anymore, and he refuses to force himself into being what he's not. He was miserable for so long. It's all still so novel somehow and he's still soaking it all in like a sunny day.  
So it doesn't matter that Realmuto won't be anything more than a fuckbuddy.  
Because it's enough. It's enough for Bryce.

He thinks about all these years back and the fear in his gut in Kris's bedroom, and the weight of reality, of obligations, the weight of duty and the weight of hope. The unavoidable immutability of his fate. And he thinks about Werth, and about Utley, and about the minor leaguers exchanging hand jobs in the bus leagues, and about all the other guys, the ones who sneak in and out of hotel rooms, the peaceful confirmed bachelors, the teenagers evaluating the pros and cons of a semi-closeted life in pro ball.

And Bryce is still a realist, just not a self-hating one anymore.  
And if he's being realistic, Realmuto's probably not his Rizzo; had never been, will never be. If he's being realistic, he doesn't want to be the one that stands up and changes all of this, the hiding and the fear.

He's not Baseball's Chosen One.

Kris, however, has other ambitions.

"Anthony really wants to go to Italy for the honeymoon. Like, Sicily. Honestly I've always wanted to see a volcano and stuff. And it's so romantic down there."

Bryce wonders what it's like to be as brave and idiotic and exceptional as Kris is.  
Bryce wonders if he'll get that kind of love one day, that kind of love so damn strong it makes all fear of danger vanish.

"So, like. You think people will be okay with it?"

Kris snorts like Bryce just made a good joke. His teeth bare in a wild, snarky grin.

"We broke the curse. What are they gonna do? Hate us?"

And fuck, Bryce knows just then that there is hope. That _Kris_ has what it takes. And he can't help but feel relieved, feel vindicated— that he was right. That it doesn't have to be him. For once in his life.

One night on the road, a few weeks later, Bryce is in Realmuto's hotel bed.  
In the darkness, he emerges for a few seconds between two cycles of sleep, his face tucked in against Realmuto's chest, basking in the intimacy ballplayers always seem to crave when they hug tight and slap ass.  
He's just awake enough then to feel thick fingers intertwining with his under the covers, and the deep comforted sound of Realmuto exhaling.

One day, maybe, Bryce will want this all the time, need this forever. Maybe that day is tomorrow. But for now, he stops thinking back. He stops living in the past. He stops worrying about the future. He's in the present.

Things may change; nothing lasts forever.

But until then, he's happy kissing his reflection.

**Author's Note:**

> It pained me a little to have to include a fake game/fight. You know how much I like my accuracy. But oh well. 
> 
> Please leave a comment if you liked it :)


End file.
